The present invention relates to optical and magnetic character recognition of a type which may be used to read standard MICR information on financial instruments such as bank checks.
Bank checks are an important part of a modern financial system. Each year in the United States more than 50 billion checks are processed for payment. To facilitate check processing a set of standards has been created for certain information, such as financial institution and account number, which is printed on blank checks in standard locations. This set of standards, referred to generally as MICR defines the characters and their placement on checks. The MICR characters are written in magnetic ink and, as a result have both an optical image and a magnetic image.
In order to process the large number of bank checks required each day, automated readers have been employed which identify, as well as they can, the information conveyed by the MICR characters on a check. In reality the readers, which move the checks across a reading head, may not be able to read all MICR data due for example, to printing quality, foreign marks in the MICR region of the check or attempts to improperly modify the MICR information. Improvements are needed in methods and apparatus for automatically interpreting MICR characters.
This need is met and a technical advance is achieved in accordance with the present invention which uses both magnetic and optical reading of the MICR characters and identifies characters so read by analyzing data representing both optical and magnetic readings to select which of the MICR characters have been read.
As described herein a check is fed through reading apparatus which identifies the location of the MICR characters and which both magnetically and optically reads the identified character locations. The data for each type or reading is normalized to values suitable for combination of the two types of data which are then merged to form a combined magnetic and optical representation of the scanned characters. The combined scanned data is analyzed by comparison with a combined magnetic and optical representation of a standard character template set. The result of the analysis results in the assignments of character values to the scanned character data.
The combined scanned data and the combined template data may be in the form of vectors which are analyzed or compared using vector analysis tools such as multiplication, error value determination and eigenvector decomposition
The analysis of combined magnetic and optical data may be used alone to identify scanned character values or it may be used in conjunction with separate analysis of the scanned optical data and scanned magnetic data. When used with separate data analysis the combined data analysis discussed herein may be used for all scanned characters or for identifying characters where the separate analysis did not sufficiently resolve a character.